A lone NYU student designed a little robot, called a TweenBot, to troll the pavement of New York City in search of a single destination. This robot could only travel forward, and had no other navigational systems on board that could help it traversethe perilous, cracked walkways of New York City. In other words, it had to rely on the kindness of human strangers, commencing what I like to call...
Like the article says, you'd expect a little robot, no matter how precious, to roll through the streets of New York at its own risk. Think of all the Sharpie markers, hot coffee and heels that little guy will encounter in the run of a day! I shudder to think. But instead of being kicked, sabotaged, defaced or otherwise harmed, this robot was adopted by the secretly nicest city in the world!!
Watch the accomplying video and feel your heart grow three sizes (which, coincidencely, put me at a size two heart--we're out of the negatives, guys!) as pedestrians take a moment out of their busy, importnant lives to help a little cardboard robot make it over a crack in the pavement. IN FACT!:
Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”
THAT MAN IS A HERO. A HERO WHO TALKS TO WEE LITTLE ROBOTS WITH THE WISDOM OF A GRANDFATHER. Seriously. If you're having a bad day, or you're a little angry at the world, I dare you to look TweenBot in the eyes, tell it that you hate it, and refuse to help. You will FAIL in this pursuit. The TweenBots' journey is supposedly meant to symbolize something greater than its tiny, adorable parts, and basically be a PERFECT METAPHOR FOR THE HUMAN CONDITION.:
The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people's willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone.
In other words, while that spin is all well and good, let's face it: we're not coming back to read about more conjecture about the metaphysical ancestry between man and machine. We're all coming back to see more adorable paper robot hijinks, hopefully next time with a little insect sidekick! OMG! YES!
Countless sci-fi novels, action films and anedoctal evidence from Morgan Freeman have tried to convince us that our reliance on technology will lead to our doom. But the most adorable social experiment ever has proven that someday, robots and humans may well live in precocious unity.
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